This invention relates to a computer system for processing data and a data processing method for the computer system. More particularly, this invention relates to a computer system suitable to process a large amount of data collected for the purpose of the preventive maintenance of factory equipment, plant equipment, or the like, and a data processing method for the computer system.
In a thermal power plant, thousands of sensors are attached to various places in the facility. Those sensors keeps transmitting sensing results on a second-by-second basis, or a millisecond-by-millisecond basis, and the amount of data transmitted over the lifetime of the plant is estimated to be as huge as several ten to several hundred terabytes. A system that manages those pieces of data which are transmitted constantly for years stores a huge amount of data in a database, and the increase of disk capacity of the database has a problem.
On the other hand, in the event of an anomaly in the plant, a manager of the plant needs to quickly identify the cause of the anomaly by analyzing sensor information which is stored in the database. Identifying the cause of the anomaly, however, takes time because it requires checking displayed sensor data (signal) that exhibits an anomalous value on a viewer or the like and issuing queries for search of the huge amount of data in the database many times in order to narrow down possible causes of the problem.
An example of solutions to this is described in JP 2002-358117 A, which solves the problem to increase the disk capacity by storing compressed sensor information in the database. This also quickens the identification of the cause of an anomaly by lowering the count of queries issued to the database.